 | 2006 |
Abstract:
The production of continuously reinforced profiles by use of aluminium as base material and a reinforcement made of steel or carbon offers a great potential for modern lightweight constructions. Within this scope, they present the potential for an increase in usage of space frame constructions in automotive or aerospace engineering. But with the insertion of reinforcement in the material flow of the extrusion process some problems can occur that are negligible in thee conventional extrusion processes: in the composite development area a significant local perturbation of the material flow is induced that can lead to the induction of high tensile stresses into the reinforcement. Due to this, failures like cracking of the reinforcement elements during the extrusion process has been detected in experimental investigations. A second problem occurring is the necessity of prediction of the seam weld position and prediction of the seam weld quality. The reinforcement can only be induced by bridge dies between two strands and due to this it is always positioned in a seam weld. While in conventional extrusion the seam weld positions is often only an aesthetical problem, now this position mainly influences the extruded profiles properties like moment of inertia. This paper deals with the problem of determination of seam weld position on the example of a double-t-profile extrusion. By use of a coupled thermo-mechanical finite element simulation with the commercial FE code HyperXtrude from Altair the velocity fields of an extrusion process with and without reinforcement were calculated and the resulting material flow was analysed. The numerical results went along with experimental investigations to verify the calculated results.